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Founder and CxO | Author of T2D3 | Board Director
Getting your startup from the minimum viable product (MVP) to unicorn status doesn’t happen by chance in today’s competitive SaaS environment. Sustainable growth requires a clear strategy, disciplined execution, and a deep understanding of market dynamics.
In this episode of Closing Time, we meet Stijn Hendrikse, author of T2D3 – a handbook for early-stage SaaS leaders.
T2D3 stands for tripling your annual revenue for two years in a row and then doubling it for three more years.
T2D3 may sound like a lofty goal, but Stijn breaks down the foundational six growth pillars from his book that have helped SaaS startups scale beyond MVP and PMF to T2D3 status and beyond.
Scaling a startup from product-market fit to unicorn status is one of the most complex challenges founders face. It’s not just about having a great product or a passionate team—it’s about understanding your market, developing a solid go-to-market strategy, and ensuring that every aspect of the business is aligned for success. For SaaS companies, the stakes are even higher, as the competitive landscape shifts quickly, and customer expectations continue to rise.
This is where the concept of T2D3 comes in. Coined in the venture capital world, T2D3 stands for “Triple, Triple, Double, Double, Double”—a framework for startups to triple their Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) for two consecutive years, followed by doubling it for the next three. While it may sound simple, achieving this level of growth is anything but. SaaS companies must execute across multiple fronts: marketing, sales, product development, and customer success, all while navigating market saturation and increasing competition.
Stijn Hendrikse, a go-to-market coach and author of T2D3: A Playbook for Mastering Software Startups, highlights the critical pillars that companies need to scale effectively. In his book and during his appearance on Closing Time, he outlines the six key pillars that can help SaaS startups break through the barriers to growth and scale with confidence.
Let’s dive into these six pillars, each designed to help founders navigate the road from a thriving product-market fit to sustainable, exponential growth.
After achieving product-market fit, the next challenge for SaaS startups is determining how to grow effectively. Reaching this stage means customers love your product, and they’re willing to pay for it, but scaling requires more than just generating demand.
It’s about balancing different growth levers, such as retention, pricing strategy, and customer experience.
Stijn explains that growth at this stage becomes a multi-dimensional challenge: “You can’t just stick with one demand gen lever; you have to invest in multiple areas, like customer retention and pricing strategy, simultaneously. Figuring out what bets to make is critical.” With so many potential areas to focus on, the risk of spreading resources too thin is real. Startups often face conflicting advice from well-meaning board members and advisors, who may each suggest different growth strategies.
That’s why prioritization is key. Whether it’s enhancing customer retention to reduce churn, adjusting pricing to increase Average Contract Value (ACV), or expanding into new markets, startups must decide which initiatives will have the biggest impact on sustainable growth.
Stijn underscores the importance of focus: chasing too many opportunities at once can dilute your efforts, making it harder to execute any of them well. He says that the most successful startups are those that concentrate on a few high-impact areas rather than trying to do everything at once.
In the crowded SaaS marketplace, differentiating yourself from the competition is crucial for long-term success. As startups scale, simply having a great product isn’t enough—they need to carve out a niche that allows them to become the go-to solution for a specific subset of customers. Stijn emphasizes that “nailing your niche” is about pinpointing a segment of the market that has unmet needs and serving that group better than anyone else.
“The niche can be relatively small, as long as you’re so relevant for these clients that they become very sticky. They won’t have any reason to go anywhere else,” Stijn explains. A well-defined niche doesn’t have to include a massive customer base; instead, it’s about being irreplaceable to a specific audience. Startups that try to appeal to everyone often find themselves stretched thin, competing against established players without a clear differentiator.
By honing in on a specific group, SaaS companies can build a deeper understanding of their customers’ unique pain points and offer a product tailored specifically to solve them. Over time, this creates a moat—a competitive advantage that makes it difficult for others to encroach on that space. Stijn advises that startups focus on becoming everything to their chosen niche rather than trying to be something for everyone. This allows them to build a loyal customer base that is less likely to churn and more likely to advocate for their product.
Marketing is no longer just about running ads or sending out email campaigns—it has evolved into a sophisticated, multi-channel effort that requires staying ahead of trends and technologies. For SaaS companies, building a modern marketing function is critical to staying competitive. Stijn points out that today’s marketers need to not only understand the latest platforms but also know how to adapt quickly to new trends.
“Even in B2B, I hear that over 70% of decisions are influenced or made through TikTok content,” Stijn says, highlighting the growing role of new platforms even in traditionally conservative spaces. The key is to remain agile. A modern marketing team should be proficient in both inbound (demand capture) and outbound (demand generation) marketing, ensuring they can both capture leads that are actively searching for solutions and generate interest from those who may not yet know they have a need.
However, it’s not just about adopting new tools. Focus is just as important in modern marketing as it is in other areas of growth. For example, gone are the days of “growth at all costs,” where companies poured money into every marketing channel without regard for efficiency. Today, marketing teams need to be resourceful, striking a balance between traditional methods like SEO and content marketing, and newer approaches like social selling and influencer partnerships.
The ability to pivot quickly while maintaining strategic focus is what separates a modern marketing function from a dated one.
One of the biggest pitfalls for SaaS startups is overestimating their Total Addressable Market (TAM) and failing to properly segment their audience. It’s tempting to think that every company in your space is a potential customer, but the reality is much more nuanced. Stijn stresses that understanding the difference between TAM, SAM (Serviceable Addressable Market), and SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market) is crucial to avoiding wasted resources and focusing on the right audience.
“It’s easy to get excited about TAM, but what really matters is what part of that market you can realistically obtain, given your resources, time, and capabilities,” Stijn warns.
While TAM represents the entire market for your product, not all of that market is accessible. SAM narrows it down to the portion that your product can actually serve, and SOM refines it further to the market you can realistically capture in the near term.
For example, a SaaS startup offering CRM software may have a TAM that includes every company with a sales or customer service team. But the SAM may only include mid-market companies that need more advanced CRM tools beyond basic solutions. The SOM might narrow it even further to focus on companies in specific industries, such as financial services or tech, or in particular regions where the startup has established sales and marketing capabilities. This refinement ensures the company is targeting the most accessible and relevant customers, maximizing the impact of its efforts.
Stijn advises that startups should be disciplined in sizing and segmenting their market to ensure that their marketing and sales efforts are laser-focused on the most attainable—and most profitable—customers.
It’s not enough to capture a lead’s attention at the top of the funnel—you need to nurture them through every stage, from awareness to consideration to conversion. Stijn points out that in B2B SaaS, the buying process often involves multiple stakeholders, each playing different roles throughout the journey.
“In B2B, the persona might be the same individual, but the role they play changes throughout the journey,” Stijn explains.
For example, early in the funnel, your messaging may need to appeal to end-users who will be directly affected by your product. Later, during the consideration stage, your content should address the concerns of those responsible for evaluating options—like budget holders or procurement teams. Finally, in the conversion stage, the messaging shifts again, focusing on convincing executives or IT departments to approve the purchase.
By tailoring content to each stage of the journey, SaaS companies can ensure their messaging is always relevant to the person they’re speaking to, increasing the chances of moving them through the funnel. This approach requires a deep understanding of the buyer personas involved in the decision-making process and the ability to create content that addresses their specific needs and concerns at each stage. It’s not just about generating leads—it’s about guiding those leads all the way to a successful conversion.
Unlike traditional marketing, which casts a wide net to attract leads, ABM focuses on targeting specific, high-value accounts with personalized campaigns. Stijn sees ABM as one of the most effective strategies for SaaS companies looking to build deep relationships with key customers.
“In the first quarter, you’re just trying to find the gaps in the defense, testing your outreach strategies. It’s only in the third quarter that you start to see meaningful conversions,” Stijn explains, using a football analogy to highlight the long-term nature of ABM. The process starts much like outbound marketing, with cold outreach and testing different messages. But over time, as you learn more about your target accounts and refine your approach, your campaigns become more targeted and effective.
ABM is particularly valuable for SaaS startups because it allows them to focus their efforts on a small number of high-value prospects, rather than trying to appeal to everyone. This personalized approach not only increases the chances of landing large deals but also helps build long-term relationships with key stakeholders.
Stijn cautions that ABM requires patience—it’s a strategy that takes time to yield results—but for startups willing to invest in the long game, the payoff can be significant.
By following these six pillars, SaaS startups can create a strategic roadmap for growth, ensuring they focus on the right priorities and make the most of their resources. With Stijn’s insights as a guide, founders can navigate the complexities of scaling while staying true to their niche, building effective marketing functions, and delivering relevant content throughout the customer journey. The long game is challenging, but with focus and persistence, T2D3 is within reach.
Learn more about these pillars and how you can achieve T2D3 by purchasing Stijn’s book or visiting his website.
How do you go from product market fit to unicorn status? Let’s talk about the sales tactics that get you there on this episode of Closing Time. Thanks for tuning into Closing time the show for Go to Market Leaders. I’m Val Riley,. VP of Marketing at Insightly and Unbounce. Today, I’m joined by Stijn Hendrikse. He is a go to market coach and author of T2D3 A Playbook for Mastering. Software Startups. Thanks for joining us today.. Thanks for having me, Val. Great to be here. Awesome. So I’m going to start off with the title of your book T2D3 and ask you to tell us what it means. T2D3 stands for Tripling your revenue two years in a row or your ARR your recurring revenue, and then doubling it three more years in a row. It was a very common term coined really in the VC world in 2015. I think that’s when you started to hear it a lot. There was a managing partner at Revengers who was credited with the coining of that acronym, but it was so common at some point that people started to ask, and I was in this space, how do you do it? You get so many different answers, and it was definitely some kind of playbook to it or some form of methods, but was definitely not well defined and it was not documented at all. There were so many books around, you know, how do you get from 0 to 1? Lean startup, how do you get going? But how do you get kind of through that next stage after you got to one? How do you get to ten? There was far less of that, and that’s what the book is about. I’m sure you are super popular with all those VCs and PE firms, though. Let’s go ahead and talk about the six kind of pillars for growth that are in the book. It starts with the first one uncovering and choosing your company’s growth priorities. Yeah, it’s one of the challenges when you have, let’s say you hit product market fit, you found a market that likes your product or service and they’re willing to pay you for it and stay actually. Right. That’s the essence of a SaaS business that people will retain. You can retain them as clients. But now growing beyond that product market fit sort of bar becomes really a multi-tasking effort for you. Now you cannot just stick with one demand gen lever, you have to have multiple you have to invest in customer retention. You have to think about your pricing and packaging strategy. Right? How do you improve your ACV? So all these things are starting to happen in parallel. You’ll probably now have a board of directors and you have other a lot of well-intended advisors who will tell you what to do. So figuring out what of those bets you are really going to make is really critical. So that’s number one. Got it. Okay. So the next one, I’ve heard this this term coined before. Nailing your niche. Right. Defining your identity, understanding your differentiation. Yeah. When you and of course, you know the CRM space very well. But if you’re in a category that is starting to mature and it’s very hard to find the category in the software business that doesn’t have already an existing set of players or other providers of solutions. If you’re in that situation where you know that you have something really meaningful to offer for a group of customers who are not getting what they need today, maybe they get too little, they get too much. That is usually a subset of the category that you are competing in and nailing, that’s what nailing the niche stands for, kind of what the dimensions of that new subsegment really are and how you define that in a way that you can use that to focus and to focus where you put your sales focus, where you drive, content marketing, etc. is really critical. And especially, again, when you’ve hit product market fit, you have this amazing asset that nobody else has that you know some of these clients better than anyone else because they’re with you. They have stayed with you for a while so they can tell you a lot more about what they need. So nailing a niche is really about doubling down on that. And the niche can usually be relatively small as long as you’re so relevant for these clients that they become very sticky that they’re not really having any reason to go somewhere else. It feels like a lot of startups can get stuck here, you know, trying to be jack of all trades, master of none, or not being willing to walk away from what could be maybe some lucrative deals because they’re outside of that niche. So how do you coach them through that? Yeah, and especially when you have gotten maybe a little bit of funding or you have the luxury of profitability and you’re able to invest in new areas, it’s extremely hard to stay away from, let’s say, bright, shiny objects, right? Opportunities that are meaningful, that are not necessarily, not worth pursuing, but they can just not be pursued at the cost of losing focus. Right. And so when you think of what happened in the last two or three years, especially in the SaaS world, Val, that that funding has been a little harder to come by. Right. And investors are expecting a little more return on their, you know, the go to market dollars, this is actually becoming easier because it’s far easier now. So there was a world before that late 2021 is really when the kind of the SaaS investment bubble like burst not burst, but reset a little bit. Before that, there was this environment of grow more, grow more or grow at any cost in any way. Right. And we’ll talk about profitability later, Right. Those days are over. So it’s a little easier now, whether it’s at the board level or in your executive team or even with your marketing team, it’s a little easier to make the case for,. Hey, let’s not try five things. Let’s do two or three really, really well. Ideally, do one well, right, or do one this week, right? And then we’ll do the other one next week. But it doesn’t mean you closed those doors. But being extremely focused will allow you to really nail a niche and build some form of a moat around it. Right. That you can defend that against the competition, even if your product is not much better. But by just focusing on a very specific part of the market better than anyone else. That in itself is a competitive differentiation. I got to say, as a marketer who was working in the 20 teens during growth at all costs, it certainly was fun, but not sustainable. So I agree that those days are definitely over. So there’s two next on your list. One is build a modern marketing function and maintain its focus, which, you know, super important that second part, and then knowing, sizing and segmenting and defining your audience. So both of these feel like they’re firmly within marketing and sales to me. Yeah, and Building. Modern Marketing Function, I’m not going to spend too much time, it makes sense, right? To have people who understand the latest user’s technology and understand like how you do TikTok, these days instead of YouTube. Right. Especially if you want to. even in B2B, val,. I hear that over 70% of decisions now being influenced or made through TikTok content because maybe the decision makers are millennials, they’re still in the YouTube generation, but the people in their team should do a little bit of the research to help kind of, they are more on the TikTok. So anyway, so but that’s maybe less interesting for the audience, but on the knowing and sizing and segmenting kind of the market, that niche, you’ve probably heard the term. TAM, SAM, SOM. Right. Total addressable market, serviceable part of that market and then the serviceable part of the market that you can realistically obtain. I’ve mostly seen challenges with that last step. It’s very common for people to describe the total addressable market as kind of, Hey, this is the opportunity, this is why we are excited about this, this is why we’re going to invest in a certain campaign, etc. And then people are relatively good with saying, well, we are not going to be able to serve a total addressable market. There’s only a part of that market that’s going to be interested in what we have to offer or better, who can actually use what we have to offer. And that’s where your term like ICP or what’s the ideal customer profile? Who are the personas that we’re trying to serve? That’s usually that step from TAM to SAM, but the last step is almost more important that you also are realistic. Even if the serviceable addressable market is relatively large, what part of that market can we obtain, given the amount of resources we have, the amount time we have, the amount of languages that we can support or local, you know, execution, etc.. And that last part I often see is not really done well. And that leads to practical example. If you run paid ads, which is still something that works today, although it’s not as easy anymore. But doing that, for example, with a limited budget in a couple of zip codes, only a certain amount of time of the week makes it much easier to win those auctions and to optimize than trying to run ads in the whole country and during the whole week. Right. And so that’s an example where when you are realistic of what part of the market can you really obtain, it also becomes easier to make your execution a lot higher ROI. That TAM number can seem kind of sexy. But you’re right, getting it down to something that’s truly achievable, it takes some discipline. Next, you say we want to focus on creating relevant messaging for the entire customer journey. I think people sometimes get it right on the on the front side of that, but getting it right through the whole journey. I think is a challenge in and of itself. Yeah, So I started my marketing career,. I was a software developer first and then at Microsoft I somehow morphed into becoming a marketer. And when I started I was in B2B and that’s where I’ve been most of my life. I did marketing for SMB Small and medium business segment at Microsoft, and the last ten years, I focused mostly on smaller software companies servicing B2B. And one of the things that I always kind of cracked my teeth on is that we used personas that were more like consumer style personas that describe what someone likes, how they, when they bring their kids to school. You know, they’re all those things which are interesting for when you think of the individual and you want to capture their attention and you want to capture their engagement, etc.. But what I find is a missing step is that in the B2B world of marketing and sales, that the persona might be the same individual, but the role they play and the way they behave really changes in during the journey. So if you think of the journey to simplify, it’s really these three stages of like awareness and consideration and converge hard. When you think of the the typical marketing sales funnel, what happens in B2B where in B2B people are trying to spend someone else’s money? Right? That’s the biggest difference with B2C is that in that first stage awareness, you might be marketing to people who are the receivers of your solution. They’re a potential user. They will say, Hey, this is important. We need a solution for this specific problem that I encounter in my role. That’s a different type of persona than the person maybe in the consideration part of the journey who gets tasked with the research to, Hey, what type of options are out there? How do we compare this solution versus that one? How do we think about the budget that we need to acquire this solution? And then the third stage of the funnel, the conversion part is usually influenced by another part of the B2B decision tree, which are the people who have to sign off on something, who have to approve something, could be people in IT, in legal, in procurement. So you have kind of these three stages of the funnel that’s often require a different approach to the personas. And even if you’re marketing to smaller businesses where this individual could be the same person who is both, hey, we need this and let’s look at some options and the should we do this today or postpone it till next year? That’s kind of what happens in these three stages of the funnel, right? Why do we need this, why you, and why now? If you don’t think about those distinct and then your content is just not going to have the same relevance, right and the messaging. Where you in the first stage have to really think about how to convince someone to care. Where in the consideration part of the funnel is much more about how to convince them that we are the right option, right? And then in the last stage of the funnel, you’re not really convincing anybody anymore. You’re helping the person who’s already convinced to convince everybody else in the organization to sign off on the purchase order or whatever the next step in the funnel is. Potentially defending against other competitors at that last stage, too. Right. So you really have to nail it. Yeah. The best tactic that I’ve seen complex software vendors use when they are kind of losing a deal is to create a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt in the less stage of the funnel and then hope to live another day, maybe be able to bit again in a couple of months. Yeah, right, right. So the last phase, I’m really excited that you zeroed in here on account based marketing because I think especially for startups, it can really be an economically viable way to market and sell like in a, in a manner that really gets you focused, hyper focused, on the right people. So why account based marketing? Yeah, the caveat here, Val, is that ABM, account-based marketing, it’s defined by many people in different ways. The way I’m thinking of it again in a B2B context is that you kind of know what your ideal customer profile looks like and you define that as a typical an organization, an account, and you’re trying to get a really sort of strong campaign that’s targeted at building our relationships within that account. And the biggest challenges that you see here, especially with smaller companies who start doing ABM, is that they’re not willing to to kind of put the effort in to this being a longer term investment. Football season has just started. And I liken to kind of I think of this a little bit as the running game when you start running the football, sorry for people outside of the United States, but talk about American football. If you start running the football, one of the things you’re doing in its first quarter was trying to see where the kind of the softness of the defenses or what are the holes that we can open up and account-based marketing typically starts a little bit like that. It’s more like outbound marketing where you’re sending out emails, you send out LinkedIn request, maybe there are other channels that you use and you’re trying to kind of see what what lists that we have are working, what type of channel is working, what content is relevant. It’s a lot of A/B testing, a lot of figuring things out, but that can take a little bit of time. It takes a couple of months. Especially when you want to understand and do something with those learnings and make them statistically relevant. So now you have to go into that second quarter and sticking with it because now you’re probably able to create the messaging and the content that’s actually going to resonate. You’ll see some early conversions, but those still will not be customers that are paying you. They might be prospects that now suddenly show up for a sales conversation. Right. And so you need kind of the third quarter to actually see this turn into revenue. And a lot of things that happen in outbound marketing are not don’t get enough time to mature and to have that type of learning for it to become effective. And that’s really sad because if you are a relatively early stage company, if you’re still trying to build the market, make the market right, you’re trying to nail that niche, you’re an expert, you are going to have to knock on some doors. Inbound marketing, let’s call that demand capture, right where people already know they have a need. They’re in the consideration stage of the funnel. Per the earlier point, they’re like at that second level of persona, they’re going to find you if you do a good job with like SEO, etc., and SEM. But there’s probably an audience out there who you need to make aware of your solution. Demand generation, not just demand captured, demand generation. And for that, doing outbound in a way that is meaningful, that is relevant, where you’re knocking on the right door is extremely critical and they’re yeah, having that level of patience that also in a football game where a team that hangs onto that running game into the third quarter, they start to see results. Account-based. Marketing is all about that long game and having the relevant content be able when you interrupt someone to have enough added value that they at least look, throw the flier away. Right? They archive your email instead of saying this is spam. Right. And so that’s really what an effective account based marketing program could look like. Well. Stijn, that’s all the time we have for today’s episode. Thank you so much for joining us on Closing Time. Thank you so much for having me, Val. And thanks to everybody out there for tuning in. Remember, you want to like this video,. Subscribe to the channel, hit that bell for notifications and you won’t miss an episode. We will see you next week.
